TRAUMATIKA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SPOILERS

The trouble with Traumatika isn't that it's a bad film: rather it's two perfectly good films that don't belong together. One is harsh, nasty and deals with very difficult issues and subjects that really need to handled very delicately and sensitively and should come with a battery of trigger warnings; the other is a satirical maniac-chases-women horror comedy that is far lighter and more typically entertaining. There's nothing wrong with either of them, in the way there's nothing wrong with, say, Munich and Carry On Matron: but they absolutely shouldn't be bolted together and the tonal shift is jarring.

Discounting a brief scene in which an unholy artefact is buried in the North African desert in 1910, the bulk of the first half concerns that newly discovered object's new owner, who opens it and becomes possessed by the evil within it, leading him to abuse his own young daughter, Fleeing, she aborts the unwanted pregnancy but is then compelled to abduct young children from the local area and raise them as potential vessels for the demon. All of this is bleak and deeply uncomfortable viewing, and rightly so. But twenty years after she was killed by the sheriff who found the bodies in the basement, her younger sister appears on a tacky true-crime TV show to tell her side of the story, as the evil appears to have returned just in time for Halloween...

And it's that part of the film which is lighter, jokier, and looks and feels like a more traditional horror movie, with satirical observation about crass media sensationalism, creepy trick-or-treat kids, actual gags (the masked maniac suddenly coming back for his hat), and the final sting that suggests It Might Not Be All Over and you should come back next year for Traumatika II. Which, again, is perfectly fine, but the gear change halfway through is too abrupt: incest and dead children don't belong in a multiplex popcorn horror, and Boo! jump scares and familiar genre tropes don't belong in a confrontational drama about rape and abortions. Either segment as its own separate movie would be fine: they're both well made and they're both interesting and absorbing, but the hitching of one to the other weakens both of them and the film as a whole.

**